Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0019407, Sat, 13 Feb 2010 23:54:28 -0200

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[NABOKOV-L] Peat/swamp/bogs...Cinderella and Van
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A. Sklyarenko: If I'm not mistaken, the Dutch pronounce the word veen ("peat bog") rather like the Anglophones do "feign" ..

ADA: "TORFYaNUYu which went through a brown square at F and through two red squares ...she recounted her monstrous points...like a princess narrating the poison-cup killing of a superfluous lover...'It's a place name! One can't use it! ...Torfyanaya, or as Blanche says, La Tourbière,...where our cendrillon's family lives. But, mon petit, in our mother's tongue - que dis-je, in the tongue of a maternal grandmother we all share...this quite ordinary adjective means "peaty," feminine gender, accusative case."

JM: Since "peat" appears in German (and perhaps in other languages) in relation to "Torf" (in the appended image by Christian Fischer, thru wiki,we find the "peat exploitation in the nature conservation area of "Ewiges Meer" ("Eternal lake"), a big moor lake in East Frisia, NW Germany,ie: Industrieller Torfabbau im/am Naturschutzgebiet Ewiges Meer in Ostfriesland"), there is an implied very close relation between the Veens and the Torfyanaya/ Tourbière descendants, particularly the multidimensional servant, Blanche.

Cinderella, Cendrillon, Aschenpüttel or Aschenbrödel, in wiki:
"Puschkin, Novalis, Tieck, Brentano, Eichendorff, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Hans Christian Andersen, Tennyson, Wilde, Mallarmé, Maeterlinck and Hofmannsthal wrote about her...the theme is explicitly handled by Christian Dietrich Grabbe (1835, "Aschenbrödel") and by Robert Walser (1901, "Die Insel") and, more recently, by the Russian poet, Jewgeni Lwowitsch Schwarz. In the German versions Cinderella's subjects are related to pigeons, shoes and hazelnuts or the hazel-tree.

The open-"knacked"* nut is a metaphor for "fulfilled knowledge" and this signification, related to "vollendeter Erkenntnis," is habitually rendered in Dutch still-life paintings.(wiki)

I couldn't find an indication about what poem by Pushkin mentions Cinderella and what are the predominant themes in it. Could the link bt. Blanche and the Veen-descendants be explained thru it?

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* - From Ada, back to Pale Fire, with Hazel and the theme of the "open-nut" ( Eystein's trompe l'oeil of a "twin-lobed, brailike, halved kernel of a walnut hiding a receptacle with the broken nutshell). We remember thaat on his way to Kinbote's house, a few minutes before he is shot, Shade was expected to have for dinner, among other things, a "knackle of walnuts", a theme already discussed in the List a few years back. I was unable to retrieve now a posting, by Victor Fet I think, explaining "knackle".

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